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but also breaking and disruptive; the negative influence between family
and (future) outlaw is one of mutual destruction. thus, it emerges that the
outlaw sagas are clearly focused on the various relationships inside the out-
laws’ families, that the ties and tensions among relatives are just as much a
concern of these narratives as are the outlaw’s adventures out in the wild.
reading the Sagas through the outlaws they Bear109
If one accepts my reading of outlaws constituting a variant, an aspect, of
the monstrous, this makes it possible to approach them and the way in
which their entanglement in family conflict in a new and different way –
as monsters, they become readable. According to Cohen, the monster is
“an embodiment of a certain cultural moment”,110 incorporating the fears,
desires and anxieties of that time. “the monstrous body is pure culture”,111
and this enables us to read it, for, as Musharbash notes, “monsters are
always bound to specific socio-cultural contexts, and within them, signify
the issue that most matters to the people they haunt.”112 thus, the monsters’
culturally specific body enables them to “offer a space where society can
safely represent and address anxieties of its time.”113 A similar argument can,
I argue, be made about figures who are monstrous in a behavioural rather
than a corporeal way.
as I have shown, the monstrously disruptive humans of the Íslendinga-
sögur are social monsters, they act not only in but also against society, and
society reacts to these actions. Accordingly, due to the social nature of
their monstrous impact, I propose that what social monsters signify are
the social concerns and anxieties haunting the culture that produced the
literature in which they appear: social monsters reflect, reflect on, point
towards societal concerns. this approach opens up a new reading of why
the family is at the heart of the outlaw narrative that goes beyond the as-
109 a nod to Cohen’s proposal of “understanding cultures through the monsters they bear”;
“Monster Culture,” 4.
110 Ibid., 4.
111 Ibid., 4.
112 Musharbash, “Introduction,” 12.
113 Marina Levina and Diem-My t. Bui, “Introduction: toward a Comprehensive Monster
Theory in the 21st Century,” Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader, eds. Marina
Levina and Diem-My t. Bui (new York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 1.
“HE HaS LonG forfEItED aLL KInSHIP tIES”